Dehumanising paper.8

Sciprints, 2016

The present paper offers a reading of three selected novels by two Anglophone Arab writers Diana Abujaber and Fadia Faqir. Our reading is fundamentally based on a philosophical post-humanist perception of other ethnic minorities as being inferior and un-human. In interpreting the three novels, Arabian Jazz (2003), My Name is Salma (2007) and Willow Trees Don’t Weep (2014), a main concern is to bring to light how Arabs –and Muslims –have been zombified and de-humanized in Western mainstream media and culture based on a biased stigmatization and stereotyping of a large heterogeneous ethnic group wherein religions, traditions, languages and cultures are diverse. Also, a pivotal preoccupation is going to be the exiling journey of the protagonists from their homelands to Western countries, and how these journeys contribute to the post-humanization of the self, the identity and the culture of Arab displaced immigrants.

Postcolonial Interventions, 2020

The article explores the representational dilemmas reflected in post- 9/11 Anglophone Arab fiction. The aim is to move beyond the Orientalist paradigm and provide fresh perspectives on the possible strategies employed to de-orientalize the Arab. Most Arab American writers address the problems associated with Orientalism. However, their approach to tackle such problems varies depending on their political and social make-up. Some subscribe to the Western discourse and rhetoric. Other writers advocate the Eastern culture, while some other writers remain in-between. This article examines Lailya Halaby’s Once in A Promised Land (2007), Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati (2008), and Alia Yunis’ The Night Counter (2009) which represent a range of the post-9/11 concerns in relation to this divide. These novelists reject the very idea of the Orientalist dichotomy. Instead, their novels offer multiple perspectives, interpretations, and reactions that all unequivocally stress the importance of intercultural understanding. Together, they call for the full recognition of Arab American identity, one set apart from Orientalist frameworks.

Postcolonial Text, 2013

International Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, 2023

The current study deciphers how Ahdaf Soueif and Fadia Faqir, who are known as diasporic Arab writers, adopt the western stereotypical perspectives towards the Arabs. Instead of advocating Arabs and demystifying their identity against the western stereotypical misconceptions, Soueif (2000) and Faqir (2007) represent Arabs as backward, passive, and violent terrorists, as evident in their novels. Th us, the study explains how those Arab diasporic writers adopt the western stance against Arabs by enhancing and highlighting the image of Arabs as different from the rest of the globe at the cost of Arabs and in favor of the West. The study deploys Said's Orientalism to read the narratives under discussion, highlighting that such narratives misrepresent how Arabs think, behave, and feel to gain some plausibility and popularity in the West (Occident). Soueif and Faqir, we argue, sacrifice the ethics of loyalty and belonging to Arabs in favor of assimilating with the West and gaining its admiration, which resulted in creating a very inaccurate portrait of Arabs. The study reveals the potential reasons of such unethical behaviors, emphasizing that falsify ing the reality of the Arab World by some Arab diasporic writers should never be the optimal way to assimilate with the West or cope with its expectations. Contribution/ Originality: Considering that most readers of Arab diaspora literature admire Soueif and Faqir for their talent of writing in English, this paper provides an original account of Soueif's and Faqir's narratives emphasizing how such Arab novelists deploy their creativity to serve the Westerners rather than their own Arab ethnicity. 1. INTRODUCTION Many Arab diasporic writers have tackled the experience of Arabs living in the West compared to their experiences living in their home countries. Some of these writers include Naomi Shihab Nye, Diana Abu Jaber, Leila Aboulela, and Mohja Kahf, among others. Such writers "have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, novels, epics, social descriptions and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, 'mind', destiny, and so on" (Said, 1978). Some of these authors devote their writings to defending the East against the different stereotypical images promoted by the West against Eastern cultures (Khimish, 2014). Other authors like Ahdaf Soueif and Fadia Faqir present a negative image of Arabs in a way that enhances and promotes the already known Western stereotypes of Arabs, an approach that opposes the ideal function of diaspora literature that usually "seeks emancipation from all types of subjugation defined in terms of

The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, 2017

's book is the first autoethnographic account of contemporary cultural practices of Arab Londoners. The study focuses on theorizing "Arabness" from the ground up, mapping the racial landscape of London and ethnographically exploring various "projects of cultural survival and intelligibility" (p. 70) in which young British Arabs engage. Aly's theoretical approach draws heavily on Judith Butler's (1990) work on performativity, positing "Arabness" as "doing" rather an a priori essence of personhood. In doing so, his work attempts to expose the hegemonic norms of "being raced" and "being gendered" (p. 9) in the day-today settings, activities, objects, and identifications through which Arabness is done in present-day London. Aly's first chapter chronicles local and transnational processes and discourses that have produced "the Arab" as a cultural object. In tracing the ebbs and flows of migration patterns, emerging Arab state systems, and British geopolitics and governmentality, Aly demonstrates how the category "Arab" has been incorporated into the multiculturalist paradigm through processes of racialization and through the logic of ethnonormativity. He defines ethnonormativity as a form of liberal population management whereby different ethnic or racial groups are homogenized by state discourses and institutions to become "knowable objects"-in this case, "'the Arabs' who are wealthy and exotic, dissimilar and suspicious, dangerous, violent and homicidal" (p. 69), distinct from their "white," "black," or "Asian" counterparts. The remaining chapters in the book present different settings that ethnographically showcase how young British Arabs negotiate being hailed and subjected by "social institutions, hegemonic gendered norms, and national and international politics and media representations" (p. 70). Chapter 2 focuses on the differential ways that young boys and girls do Arabness in academic settings, where they are often "the only Arab" in their class or school. Through narratives and informal histories, Aly explicates the complex

Traduction et langues, 2015

This paper is concerned with literary and postcolonial facets of resistance and identity negotiation as concepts through which to approach representations of postcolonial conflicts in contemporary Arab-American women's writings. These concepts operate at various levels of narratives and open new ways for remembering, narrating, and reading experiences via problematizing the discourses of Arab women's experiences in diaspora. This paper aims to posit negotiation as a concept of writing and reading which actively engages events, discourses which implies pluralistic conception of social, political, and cultural agency. More specifically, the study explores the ways in which novelists descending from Arab origins, Diana Abu-Jaber and Laila Halaby, deploy negotiation and resistance as tools for aesthetic and socio-political engagement in postcolonial narratives to escape hegemonization. It is a reflection on the notion of hybrid identities and varied cultural provenance of non-native writings. Through its negotiated and interdisciplinary approach to narratives of alienation along with multi-consciousness of identity, this paper does not only engage with multiple discourses derived from postcolonial studies. It also intervenes into the conceptions of nation, memory, and accountability.

Voicing many liminal selves and marginal subjects, particularly Arab immigrants has often been a main preoccupation for most contemporary Arab writers living in the Diaspora or between home and Diaspora. A commitment to giving voice to unvoiced and marginalized individuals, mainly women and immigrants, is to be found in Anglophone Arab women narratives. Among these writers, the British Jordanian novelist Fadia Faqir has been engaged in verbalizing the agonies of oppressed women, discriminated subalterns and dislocated immigrants. Most of her literary productions deal with the hardships of living in milieus where the individual is liminal, i.e. occupying that position on both sides of a social, religious or gender threshold. In her novel, My Name is Salma, the protagonist Salma represents a multiplicity of liminal selves: oppressed women of Bedouin societies, non-European immigrants and innocent lovers. In this paper, I aim at exploring the hardships these liminal selves, i.e. marginalized Arab and/or

2011

The purpose of this thesis is to compare the works of contemporary Arab British andArab American women novelists with a view toward delineating a poetics of themore nascent Arab British literature. I argue that there is a tendency among ArabBritish women novelists to foreground and advocate trans-cultural dialogue andcross-ethnic identification strategies in a more pronounced approach than their ArabAmerican counterparts who tend, in turn, to employ literary strategies to resiststereotypes and misconceptions about Arab communities in American popularculture. I argue that these differences result from two diverse racialized Arabimmigration and settlement patterns on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter One looksat how Arab British novelist Fadia Faqir?s My Name is Salma and Arab Americannovelist Diana Abu-Jaber?s Arabian Jazz define Arabness differently in the light ofthe precarious position Arabs occupy in ethnic and racial discourses in Britain and inthe United States. Chapter Two e...

SCTIW Review: Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World

Journal of Language Teaching and Research

The study aims to identify how Arab-American authors Naomi Shihab Nye and Diana Abu-Jaber depict Arabs in their novels, Habibi and Crescent. Additionally, the study attempts to compare and contrast between the two writers’ depictions of Arabs in their novels. To achieve the objectives of the study, the theory of Post-colonialism is used; more specifically, Edward Said’s views from his book Orientalism are applied to both novels. The study concludes by showing how both Nye and Abu-Jaber depict Arab characters in an ambivalent way within their works, Habibi and Crescent, respectively, in that they sometimes present Arabs in a positive light and other times in a negative light. The study also concludes with a set of concepts that include lack of identity, hybridity, and multiculturalism that have affected Arab-Americans and influenced their cultural values. These representations are also considered ambivalent.